Judge: Trump's release of dossier memos opens door to disclosures from FBI

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https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2018/08/16/trump-dossier-fbi-disclosures-782237

Judge: Trump's release of dossier memos opens door to disclosures from FBI
By JOSH GERSTEIN
08/16/2018 09:40 PM EDT


President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify competing congressional memos about the validity of the so-called Steele dossier means the FBI has lost its authority to rebuff Freedom of Information Act requests about the bureau’s efforts to verify the report’s intelligence linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 campaign, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta previously blessed the FBI’s decision to refuse such FOIA requests by declining to confirm whether any records exist about aspects of its handling of the hotly contested dossier, prepared by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The judge ruled in January that Trump’s tweets about the dossier did not require the FBI and other intelligence agencies to be more responsive to public records requests on the issue.

However, Mehta said Trump’s actions in February to greenlight the release of one memo from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and a separate memo from the panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, left untenable the FBI’s position of resisting disclosure.

“It remains no longer logical nor plausible for the FBI to maintain that it cannot confirm nor deny the existence of documents” related to attempts to verify information in the dossier, Mehta wrote in a 13-page opinion.

The Justice Department sought to distinguish between the dossier discussed in the House memos and a synopsis of the dossier presented to Trump and then-President Barack Obama in 2016. However, the judge rejected that stance. “That position defies logic,” wrote Mehta, an Obama appointee. He also rejected the government’s refusal to say whether the FBI even has a copy of the synopsis.

The decision came on an FOIA lawsuit filed last year by this reporter and a pro-transparency group, the James Madison Project.

“This ruling represents another incremental step in revealing just how much the FBI has been able to verify or discredit the rather personal allegations contained in that synopsis derived from the Steele dossier,” said Brad Moss, a lawyer pressing the lawsuit. “It will be rather ironic if the president’s peripheral actions that resulted in this ruling wind up disclosing that the FBI has been able to corroborate any of the ‘salacious’ allegations.”

A Justice Department spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the decision.

The ruling will not take immediate effect, because the case was on appeal to the D.C. Circuit when Trump approved release of the House memos. The appeals court is now likely to remand the case to Mehta to determine whether the FBI has other grounds to withhold records about verifying the dossier.

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